Still, it’s a growing trend to live vicariously through our children and so last year to hope that they grow up to be the best than they can be rather than – well just to grow up on TV. Because TV makes everything real – it validates us in a way that real life in all its B side incompleteness just can’t compete with. I’m thinking ….maybe a cooking show will do it. It’s not like there are enough of those around. I could send a … (what’s the collective noun for hippies? A school of fish, a kindle of kittens…), a commune of hippies to get a job at the local meat works and make them cook something tasty out of tripe. There’d be a love affair amongst the off cuts and at least one would go nuts for the ratings. I could be the deranged host – I learnt to swear in real kitchens so that won’t be a problem and I could toss lots of fresh herbs randomly at things to satisfy the Jamie Oliver fans. I could take the girl out of school and get her to cook hedgehogs in clay and reply politely to the notices from the SPCA. It’d be educational. I’d just get the Latin to cook a traditional Argentine barbeque with all his mates – the first time he did that I came home from work and thought I’d walked onto the film set of some vegetarian porn movie – half a cow was roasting on my back yard and the calculations per guest were half a kilo of meat for women and a kilo for each bloke. Now that’s entertainment.

At the end of each show I could say “Three beautiful hippies stand before me but only one will go on to be New Zealand’s next Alison Holst”. I could look deep in their eyes and ask them if ‘they really want it’ – the chequered frock and slightly queenie hairdo and a winning way with scotch eggs that is, then stand back while they claw their way to fame by being evil and duplicitous to all their new housemates. Then once we have done a complete character assassination on each person with a board of my most trusted friends – we’d send them packing and laugh at them behind their backs while they can go home to their newly developed neuroses. Yup, reality TV has so much to teach small kids and adults alike.

I’m going to go with the adventure cooking beauty pageant queen idea. Dress the six year old in a pink cowboy suit with a tiara – tie her to a chair with a thousand helium balloons with all the ingredients to cook the hedgehog in clay wherever she alights. That surely has never been done before. There was a Brazilian priest awhile ago who tried the chair and balloon thing and he was last seen floating somewhere over the Atlantic and hasn’t been heard from since. We’d be a world first.

The problem with the Balloon Boy Dad is that he didn’t take the idea far enough. If he’d been really committed he would have let his kid get in the balloon. Anything goes in reality TV land. Even compromising the lives of small children. Just show me where to sign.